A LIFE OF THE MIND As Professor Ian Phillips revealed, Gareth Evans’s brief life was nothing short of extraordinary, says Peter Heller (Year 12)
I t seems only right that a man of Gareth Evans’s stature finally be honoured at Dulwich College. Born in 1946 at the beginning of the post-war baby boom, Evans grew up in a middle-class family on the Larkhall Estate in the Streatham-Clapham borderlands. Welsh by heritage and also by temperament, Evans felt a strong connection with Wales throughout his life, describing his holidays there as some of the happiest moments of his life. Evans joined Dulwich in 1957 as part of the Dulwich Experiment, through which subsidised places were offered by the London County Council to the most academically talent- ed boys. In fact, this era is often considered the school’s zenith, with the College frequently finding itself at the top of the league tables and regularly sending more boys to Oxford and Cambridge than did any other school. Evans quickly developed a reputation for being pre- cocious, although this occasionally translated into audaciousness when facing his teachers. His school reports make for fascinating reading. EN Williams, his English teacher, was very generous in his praise, writing with reports ranging from: ‘Excellent. A stimulating and fluent member of the set’ to ‘Excellent in every way, and winning all down the line his battle with the English language.’ Other teachers were less complimentary. He was often criticised for his unwieldy writing style, with History teacher Mark Whittaker, usually congratulatory, writing, ‘Stimulating, even arrogant, in discussion, thorough in reading and notes, over-dogmatic, even eccentric in essay work.’ Despite these minor niggles, Evans passed his A levels with flying colours and took up a place at University College, Oxford to study Philosophy, Politics and Economics. At ‘Univ’, as it is still commonly known, Evans had the good fortune of being tutored by the legendary, yet at the time old-fashioned philosopher Peter Strawson. According to Evans, tutorials with Strawson were akin to ‘interviews with God’, and this admiration went both ways, with Evans quickly becoming his protégé. Evans was also taught by the eminent philosophers Elizabeth Anscombe (who referred to him as ‘first class’) and the
Evans was made a Fellow of University College, Oxford, soon after his graduation at the age of 23, a rare feat for someone who had only completed a bachelor’s degree Evans’s contribution to philosophy cannot be overstated. Following his death, The Varieties of Reference , the work often considered to be his masterpiece, was published. In it, he explains the different kinds of references to objects that need to be made before recognition occurs. Evans’s death to cancer left a huge void in philosophy, with his mentor Peter Strawson writing: ‘He achieved much in a short time and would have achieved much more, had he lived.’ The Evans Room will be a constant reminder of the extraordinary legacy which Gareth Evans leaves to the world of philosophy, and will help to keep alive the mem- ory of a man whose loss, according to the psychologist Jeffrey Gray, will always be ‘hard to measure, impossible to express’. ◉ In what was a remarkable reflection of his intellectual power and pedagogical ability, Evans was made a Fellow of University College soon after his graduation at the age of 23, a rare feat for someone who had only completed a bachelor’s degree. As a tutor, Evans was praised for his dynamic and engaging style, ready to critique his own lines of thinking as much as those of his students. He also had a reputation of setting a high premium on hard work, being known for kicking students out of tutorials when they weren’t concentrating. great AJ Ayer, both of whom were instrumental in Evans’s academic development. After graduating in 1967 with the ‘best First for many a year’, Evans travelled to the United States to take up a teaching position at Harvard University. Whilst in America, Evans decided to embark on a road trip with one of his closest friends, Arnold Cragg (who attended the event in Evans’s honour), in order to get to Berkeley. Other trips included an inauspicious visit to Mexico City, where he was shot in the knee, and where, shockingly, the friend accom- panying him was killed after a run-in with local cartels.
36
THE ALLEYNIAN 712
Made with FlippingBook - Online magazine maker